Bereavement needs assessment in specialist palliative care: A review of the literature

Bereavement needs assessment for specialist palliative care services has been highlighted as important by NICE guidance on palliative care for adults with cancer. Identifying and implementing appropriate bereavement measurement tools has remained a challenge. This paper identifies and reviews bereavement measurement tools to determine their suitability for use within bereavement services and hospice settings. Cochrane, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and CINAHL, electronic databases were searched, yielding 486 papers. From fifty-nine full text papers appraised, 10 measurement tools were analysed in detail. Some tools had been tested on specific populations which limited transferability to specialist palliative care settings; some lacked adequate theoretical links and were not effective in discriminating between normal and complicated grief reactions; and some lacked clear evidence of validity or reliability. Based on these criteria, conclusions are drawn about the suitability of particular tools for UK bereavement services and hospice settings where intervention is delivered by both trained professionals and volunteers.

The needs of children and young people with cerebral palsy.

Because cerebral palsy (CP) is a sufficiently common condition of childhood and adolescence, the number and needs of these children and young people with cerebral palsy are monitored by centres across the UK () and Europe (). This article describes the epidemiology of CP in childhood using data derived from the Northern Ireland Cerebral Palsy Register, which is one of the longest running CP registers in Europe. The findings presented here are similar to, and representative of, the epidemiology of CP in the western world ().

Causality, apparent 'superluminality' and reshaping in barrier penetration

We consider tunneling of a nonrelativistic particle across a potential barrier. It is shown that the barrier acts as an effective beam splitter which builds up the transmitted pulse from the copies of the initial envelope shifted in the coordinate space backward relative to the free propagation. Although along each pathway causality is explicitly obeyed, in special cases reshaping can result an overall reduction of the initial envelope, accompanied by an arbitrary coordinate shift. In the case of a high barrier the delay amplitude distribution (DAD) mimics a Dirac delta function, the transmission amplitude is superoscillatory for finite momenta and tunneling leads to an accurate advancement of the (reduced) initial envelope by the barrier width. In the case of a wide barrier, initial envelope is accurately translated into the complex coordinate plane. The complex shift, given by the first moment of the DAD, accounts for both the displacement of the maximum of the transmitted probability density and the increase in its velocity. It is argued that analyzing apparent

Resource access needs and capabilities as mediators of the relationship between VC firm size and syndication

Drawing from the resource-based view and transaction costs economics, we develop a theoretical framework to explain why small and large firms face different levels of resource access needs and resource access capabilities, which mediate the relationship between firm size and hybrid governance. Employing a sample of 317 venture capital firms, drawn across six European countries, we empirically assess our framework in the context of venture capital syndication. We estimate a path model using structural equation modeling and find, consistent with our theoretical framework, mediating effects of different types of resource access needs and resource access capabilities between VC firm size and syndication frequency. These findings advance the small business literature by highlighting the trade-offs that size imposes on firms that seek to manage their access to external resources through hybrid governance strategies.